Dr. Alfredo C. Robles, Jr.
Conferred AY 2014-2015
Professional Profile:
Since my retirement in May 2015, the focus of my research has shifted away from ASEAN-EU relations and the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) and turned to the South China Sea Arbitration. My earlier research, which had been published in two books, The Political Economy of Interregional Relations: ASEAN and the EU (Ashgate, 2004), and The Asia-Europe Meeting: The Theory and Practice of Interregionalism (Routledge, 2008) and a number of articles published in European and Asian journals, had been recognized by the Achievement Award in the Social Sciences of the National Research Council of the Philippines (NRCP) in 2016.
By 2015, two years into the arbitral proceedings, I had realized the need for scholarly commentary on the Arbitration from a Filipino perspective. My research, which draws on sources in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, focuses strictly on the arbitral proceedings, touching only tangentially on Philippine foreign policy and on Sino-Philippine relations. It has resulted in the publication of four books in eight years, for a total of about half a million words. The first, The South China Sea Arbitration: Understanding the Awards and Debating with China (2019)
https://www.dlsu.edu.ph/research/publishing-house/book-publications/the-south-china-sea-arbitration/ is a co-publication of DLSU Publishing House and Sussex Academic Press. The second, third, and fourth books – Endangered Species and Fragile Ecosystems in the South China Sea. The Philippines v. China Arbitration (2020) https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-13-9813-1, Vessel Collisions in the Law of the Sea: The South China Sea Arbitration (2022) https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-16-9793-7, and The Defaulting State and the South China Sea Arbitration (2023)
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-19-6394-0 – have been published by Palgrave-Macmillan. A Philippine edition of the second book has been published by the DLSU Publishing House, which is also preparing Philippine editions of the third and fourth books. There is no precedent in the Philippines or abroad for such extensive commentary by an individual scholar on a single international legal case. My work will hopefully serve as a major reference, or at least the starting point, for anyone interested in the Arbitration, saving him/her the trouble of reading hundreds, if not thousands, of titles on the Arbitration.
Since 2015 I have occasionally lectured at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of the Department of Foreign Affairs. I have also worked as an interpreter of the French and Spanish languages at in-person meetings here and abroad as well as for online meetings; as a translator of the Spanish language; and as an expert witness in the Spanish language before several Regional Trial Courts, for the purpose of certifying the accuracy of my translations of legal documents written in Spanish.
